“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (post 2): Possible indications of multiple personality in the previously quoted interview and the opening of this novel

from interview in post 1:

“DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself…”

People with only one personality can be quite ambivalent and may entertain several points of view. But when people have the subjective experience of hearing themselves or of  “writing to myself” (not for myself) or being aggressive with themselves or being hostile to themselves, they may be describing the interaction of two personalities. (Of course, since the writer is not psychotic, she knows that her reader, objectively, “is me.”)

Psychiatric Opening

Maria Wyeth, the protagonist, is psychiatrically hospitalized for unstated reasons. She mentions that she has migraine headaches (1, p. 5), which doesn’t prove anything. But it is a fact that bad headaches are the most common physical symptom of people with multiple personality. (Some multiples get a bad headache whenever they switch personalities.)

However, what Maria may have that would be more specific to multiple personality are memory gaps. She repeatedly says, “I have trouble with as it was” (1, pp. 7, 9). She also says, “I never in my life had any plans, none of it makes any sense, none of it adds up” (1, p. 7). At this point, I cannot be sure what she means, but memory gaps are a reasonable hypothesis: to be, or not to be, confirmed by the rest of this novel.

1. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.